Israeli Researcher Finds Cure for Leukemia. British Doctors Campaign to Expel Israeli Physicians From World Body

1. A form of treating Leukemia pioneered by Israeli immunologist Zelig Esshar cured 94% of cases of Leukemia in a recent trial. Eshhar has been conducting T-cell research for over a decade, and in 2014 was recognized by leading industry publication Human Gene Therapy along with Dr. Carl June of the University of Pennsylvania for their work in the field. Their immune-based treatment is especially effective against Acute Lymphoblastic Leukemia, the most common and once the most deadly childhood cancer, that only a few decades ago was considered incurable.

Israel is a world leader in the treatment of Leukemia. For example, the Herzliya Medical Center boasts of extraordinary cure rates for Acute Myelogenous Leukemia (claiming up to 91%), a form of Leukemia that was once a virtual death sentence. Breakthroughs in Leukemia are of particular significance because of the blood cancer’s occurrence in all age groups including the very young.

2. Apparently such life-saving breakthroughs do not impress everyone. Seveny-one British physicians have called for the expulsion of Israeli physicians from the World Medical Association (WMA). This is not the first time this group has demanded the expulsion of Israel from the world medical body. None of the letter signers can claim to have pioneered a breakthrough in treating childhood Leukemia, but they wear their self-proclaimed humanitarianism ever so ostentatiously.

An anti-Zionist web site published what it claims is a copy of the letter sent to the WMA. The letter rehashes the sort of allegations made in a similar letter seven years ago accusing Israeli doctors of using “torture as an instrument of state policy.” Such allegations have previously been exposed as lacking substantiation.

In fact, despite the state of war that exists between Israel and Hamas, the terrorist group that governs the Gaza Strip, Israeli hospitals provide life-saving medical services to thousands of Gazans. This continues despite the risk that Gazan patients will carry out terrorist attacks against Israeli medical personnel providing them with critical care. Such an incident occurred in 2005, when a Gazan woman, Wafa al Bass, undergoing treatment at an Israeli facility for severe burns from a cooking accident, tried to detonate a concealed bomb in order to kill the nurses and doctors attending to her.

One of the letter’s co-signers, British psychiatrist Derek Summerfield, has campaigned for decades to ostracize Israel. The fact that Palestinians stricken by intractable illnesses and devastating childhood conditions benefit enormously from Israeli medical interventions is apparently unimportant to these anti-Israel doctors who through their political agitation against Israeli doctors expose the emptiness of their hippocratic oath.